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Overview

This starkly Modern teaching and auditorium building was completed first (along with the Central Plaza Parking Garage) in 1971, at a cost of $4,414,777. A year later, another addition to this central ensemble, the Undergraduate Library, (named for Charles Odegaard at the end of his tenure as university president in 1973) opened. Finally, Meany Hall #2, a large performance and auditorium building was completed in 1974 on the southwest end of the main plaza that came to be known as "Red Square."

Building History

The Spokane-based firm of Walker McGough Foltz Lyerla-Peden produced this Brutalist design for Kane Hall, an aesthetic prominently displayed in many University of Washington (UW) buildings erected during the heyday of campus funding in the late 1960s. After 1973, the UW greatly slowed its capital spending on buildings, as Federal money began to gradually disappear during the decade's economic "stagflation."

The firm led by Bruce Walker and John McGough, Architects, AIA, added partners to its title while Kane Hall was being planned and built, meaning the commission was gained first by Walker and McGough and completed by the firm Walker McGough Foltz Lyerla-Peden, Architects and Engineers.

Kane Hall housed a number of classrooms, meeting spaces and the large Roethke Auditorium, named for the renowned UW poet Theodore Roethke (1908-1963), who drowned tragically at the age of 55. South-facing windows lining Red Square illuminated the Walker-Ames Room, a large meeting and reception hall named for the Walker Ames Family, generous donors to the UW. This family also donated their 1907 residence for use as the UW President's House.

Kane Hall was named for Thomas Franklin Kane (1863-1953), a lawyer and scholar of Latin and Greek languages, who served as the UW's fourteenth President between 1902 and 1914. He was forced out by the Regents and replaced by Henry Suzzallo (1873-1933).

Building Notes

The Brutalism of Kane Hall's exterior was calculated to contrast with the ornate Gothic styling of that of nearby Suzzallo Library, providing a subtle foil to the older and more elaborate centerpiece of Red Square. Norman Johnston observed, however, that Kane Hall's piers echoed spacing of openings of Suzzallo. He wrote in 1995: "The rhythm of the piers does suggest a consciousness of the similar structural module in Suzzallo Library, to the east." (See Norman Johnston, The Fountain and the Mountain, [Woodinville, WA, and Seattle, WA: Documentary Book Publishers and University of Washington, 1995], p. 111.)

The bold use of reinforced concrete, crisp geometry and minimal appearance of Kane Hall recalled works by Italian Rationalist architects of the 1930s, such as Giuseppe Terragni's Casa del Fascio (1932-1936) in Como, Italy. There was a revival of interest in Italian Rationalism during the 1960s, a movement known as "La Tendenza," with Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) being the best-known practitioner in the US.

PCAD id: 5184